Been a couple of months since I tossed a post out there – the latter half of 2013 was a bit of a shake-up, so please forgive the lapse. In other news, I can’t get my favorite Chinese story website, tom61.com, to load anymore, #sadface. Fingers crossed that’s a temporary glitch, but if not, I’ll mourn the loss of a fantastic learner’s website.

The content of this story is for children, but the language is not beginner, and neither is the sentence structure – this is an intermediate read for sure. I say that because it feels very “fairy-tale” language-y, in the sense that sentences are formed in a more literary way, rather than in a chatty way, and there are some uncommonly-heard words, like “footprint” (脚印), etc. The tone of the story, on the other hand, is very tra-la-la, winter sparkly glitter magic.

Two quick notes on phrases here: 传来了 chuàn lái is an intermediate phrase that can be a little hard to understand, but it is used in reference to things we hear that come to us from afar. This may include voices (like hearing someone’s voice from outside your house), or noises, or smells, or a piece of news. You can use this to talk about sensations and things that come to you from no particular person or direction – from “afar” or “all around”.

掏出 tāo chū: this means to fish something out of something else. For example, to fish your phone out of your pocket, or to fish your sweatshirt out of your backpack.

It’s snowing, it’s snowing! Flakes of snow lightly danced like dandelions in the air, and after a while, the earth wore clothes of pure white.

Cute little bear incautiously sprained his ankle, and had to lie in bed all alone. Suddenly, from outside the window came the sound of lighthearted singing. Little bear looked out the window, and [saw that it was] Little Mouse and Little White Rabbit dancing and singing! The snow still held [impressions of] their cute little footprints. Little Bear was truly envious! But what could he do? Little Bear gave a deep sigh, and said aloud to himself: “Better get some more sleep, and maybe in my dream there will be a miracle!”

Sure enough, Little bear had a good dream. In his dream, an old man with a long beard came into his room. The old man fished a little bottle out of his pocket, and smilingly sprayed [some liquid from the bottle] on Little Bear’s wounded foot. Little Bear immediately leaped up and frisked about, playing cheerfully with his [two] buddies on the snowy ground.

The happy sounds of the small birds woke Little Bear up, and [found that] actually it was all just a dream. But then he discovered that there was a small bottle in his hand! Little Bear took up the small bottle and sprayed it on his foot, and the wounded foot was immediately better! This really was a bottle of magic water! After that, Little Bear never again feared bumps and bruises.

Thank you so much! I love this website. I can finally read chinese with a little more ease and I feel like I am actually learning. A really big thank you to all the people who got together to create this awesome website. Just thank you so much! <3

You can probably tell Chinese isn’t my first language. I’ll sing my praises for this site in English; I understand what an enormous commitment it is to maintain this site, and I hope you know just how much we all appreciate your efforts. I would be entirely lost for good reading material were it not for you.

That’s awsome I mean imagin if that happend to you and that happend… that would be a miricle come true. This can actualy happen in real life it’s happend to my dad before. I’m really enjoying this website thanks for all the effort you put into this THANKS ONCE A GAIN